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With Bible in One Hand and Battle-Axe in the Other: Carry A. Nation as Religious Performer and Self-Promoter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Frances Grace Carver
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Extract

Why do high school history books mention Carry Nation and not other women (and there were many) who marched into saloons with hatchets, pokers, Bibles, and off-key accordians? And why is it that these history textbooks caricature her as a masculinized and menopausal megalomaniac rather than as a religiously inspired reformer who gave voice to the hopes of thousands of people longing for an alcohol-free promised land? The answer to the first question lies in Nation's own genius at self-promotion and her remarkably media-genic personality. She had undeniable charisma and a certain brilliance in making the most out of it. The answer to the second question lies in the even greater success of entrepreneurs who manipulated her public appeal to their own profit-making advantage by luridly packaging her personality and Crusade with brassy embellishments and blatant untruths. The commercial culture she sought to manipulate, in the end, got the best of her: retailers, reporters, and her so-called managers twisted her image to fit their own desires to turn a quick profit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 31 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1999

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References

Notes

The author wishes to thank James H. Moorhead, Leigh Schmidt, Jane Dempsey Douglass, and James Deming.

1. “Sees Work of the Devil,” in the Carry Nation Scrapbook, housed in the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka; Nation, Carry A., The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, rev. ed. (Topeka, Kans.: F. M. Stevens, 1909), 119-21, 247, 361Google Scholar (for an admirer's use of the term “New Deborah,” see J. E. Wolfe's poem, “The New Deborah,” Smasher's Mail, April 1, 1901); Diggs, Annie, “A Study of Mrs. Nation: The Responsibility of Topeka Women,” New Republic Magazine (March 1901): 35.Google Scholar

2. Painter, Neil Irvin, “Writing Biographies of Women (Review Essay),” Journal of Women's History 9, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 162 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braude, Ann, “Women's History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Tweed, Thomas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107.Google Scholar

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4. Men did the same thing, as R. Laurence Moore notes of Billy Sunday and George Whitefield. However, male reinvention was not necessary, as female reinvention was, to justify entrance into the public sphere. See Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41–42, 186-88.Google Scholar

5. “Campbellite” refers to the primitivist sectarian movement launched by Thomas and Alexander Campbell in the early nineteenth Century. In 1832, the Campbellites merged with the Kentucky Stoneites to form the Stone-Campbell movement, which, in subsequent decades, divided into at least three denominations: the Churches of Christ (noninstrumental), the Christian Church (Independent), and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

6. Nation, Carry A., The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (Topeka, Kans.: F. M. Stevens, 1904), 33 Google Scholar; Carry A. Nation, “Diary,” May 23, 1873 (this diary is housed in the Manuscript Collection of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas). See also Nation, , The Use and Need, 29.Google Scholar

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15. Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 132, 134, for her revisionary embellishments.

16. William McKinley, quoted in Painter, Neil Irvin, Standing at Armageddon, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 147.Google Scholar Other temperance leaders include the heroine of the Hillsboro, Ohio, Crusade of 1874, Eliza Thompson, who claimed God's intervention when she shut herself up in a room and took a cue from her daughter's providentially opened Bible, and Frances Willard, who turned to God at three key moments in her career: deciding whether to pledge herself to temperance, putting WCTU support behind the suffrage movement, and merging with the Prohibition Party. Her method of divination was to open the Bible at random and see how God was speaking to her at the place where she landed. An account of Thompson's experience is in Hillsboro Crusade: Sketches and Family Records, By Mrs. Eliza Thompson, Her Two Daughters and Frances Willard (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1906), 60-61; Willard 's various episodes of seeking divine guidance are recounted in Bordin, Ruth, Frances Willard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 72, 97.Google Scholar

17. Gurr, Ted, ed., Violence in America: Protest, Rebellion, Reform, vol. 2 (New York: Sage Publications, 1989), 36–37.Google Scholar

18. “City to be Conducted Just as Mrs. Nation May Order,” a news release from Concord, Nebraska, dated April 4, 1901, in the Carry Nation Scrapbook. The scrapbook also contains a clipping of February 16, 1901, announcing that the Indiana legislature was legalizing smashing.

19. Topeka Daily Capital, January 25, 1901; Carry A. Nation, interview with Dickinson, A. M., Saturday Globe (Utica, New York), April 2, 1901, 5 Google Scholar; Charles Sheldon, lecture to the Topeka City Federation, quoted in Topeka Daily Capital, February 8, 1901, 1; Sheldon, Charles M., Charles M. Sheldon: His Life Story (New York: Doran Company, 1925), 87.Google Scholar See also Sheldon's later accounts of Nation's Crusade: “When Carrie Nation Came to Kansas,” Christian Herald, January 4, 1930, 18; “Carrie Nation's Hatchet Becomes a Crusade,” Christian Herald, January 11, 1930, 20; and “If Carrie Nation Returned to Kansas,” Christian Herald, January 18, 1930, 15.

20. Jennie Small Owen, annalist, and Mechem, Kirke, ed., Annals of Kansas: 1886-1925, vol. 1 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, n.d.), 376-77.Google Scholar Because Nation changed her name after she had begun her work, some sources quoted in this article give the original spelling of her first name: “Carrie.”

21. “Carrie Nation Thrown Out of Saloon,” Austin-American Statesman, October 16, 1902.

22. D. A. Frank, “How B Hall Made the Famous Carrie Nations [sic] the Butt of Many Jokes,” in B-Hall: Stories of and about the Famous Breckenridge Hall, Texas University, ed. Nugent Brown (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor Company, 1938), 95, 97; Daily Texan, October 15, 17, 1902.

23. For instance, see her comments about advertising in her autobiography, where she argues that Jacob of the Bible was the first advertiser and that the opponents of tobacco and whiskey need to be better than the manufacturers of those “hell-sticks” and “liquid damnation.” Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 244-45.

24. Austin-American Statesman, October 13, 1902.

25. Simmons, “Flashback,” 52; The World, New York, November 15, 1902.

26. For an excellent analysis of the public image of Kansas during this time, see Bader, Robert Smith, Hayseeds, Moralizers, and Methodists: The Twentieth-Century Image of Kansas (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1988).Google Scholar

27. For a very persuasive critique of the explanatory value of “feminization,” see Braude, , “Women's History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Tweed, , 94–97.Google Scholar

28. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place ofGrace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture: 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 44.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., 48; Bader, , Prohibition in Kansas, 154-55.Google Scholar

30. Blumhofer, Edith, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).Google Scholar

31. Repplier, Agnes, quoted in Lears, No Place of Grace, 48.Google Scholar

32. Bader, , Prohibition in Kansas, 154 Google Scholar; Smasher's Mail, March 30, 1901; Lears, , No Place of Grace, 300.Google Scholar See also Charles Ponce de Leon, “Idols and Icons: Representations of Celebrity in American Culture, 1850-1940” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1992). For an analysis of the consumer ethos and the West, see Butler, Anne M., “Selling the Popular Myth,” in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Milner, Clyde and others (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 771–802 Google Scholar; and Cronon, William, Miles, George, and Gitlin, Jay, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992).Google Scholar

33. Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutz, Tom, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 6–7 Google Scholar; Lears, , No Place of Grace, 51.Google Scholar Lutz emphasizes the heterogeneity of the experiences and meanings of nervousness and the richness this brought to the discourse which had important social and economic implications.

34. On Hall, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, chap. 3; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), 95 Google Scholar; Brown, Richard Maxwell, “Violence,” in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Milner, , 421 Google Scholar (see Slotkin, Richard, The Myth of Regeneration: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973 Google Scholar], for a general treatment); White, Richard, It's Your Misfortune But None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 621.Google Scholar

35. Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 100 Google Scholar; see chap. 5 on Roosevelt. See also Slotkin, Richard, “Nostalgia and Progress: Teddy Roosevelt's Myth of the Frontier,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 608-37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. See Higham, John, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 73–102.Google Scholar

37. The World, New York, November 16, 1902; Hill, Mary A., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 147 Google Scholar (see also Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 131 Google Scholar; and Lutz, , American Nervousness, 224-31Google Scholar); Lutz, , American Nervousness, 20, 31-32.Google Scholar

38. Madeline Southard, “Mrs. Nation,” Carry Nation Scrapbook (William Railey, who remembers hearing her as a boy, says the same thing, History of Woodford County [Baltimore: Reginald Publishing, 1975], 215); Juster, Susan, “The Spirit and the Flesh: Gender, Language, and Sexuality in American Protestantism,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Stout, Harry and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 352-53.Google Scholar For more on muscular Christianity, see Carnes, Marc and Griffen, Clyde, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar

39. The World, New York, February 12, 1901.

40. Ibid., August 27, 1901.

41. Ibid.

42. Nation, The Use and Need, 81, 121; New York Times, September 11, 1901.

43. The World, New York, November 9, 21, 1901; New York Tribune, November 21, 1901; Nation, , The Use and Need, 122.Google Scholar

44. Stout, Harry S., Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991)Google Scholar; Moore, Selling God.

45. Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 233; Kansas City Star, January 31, 1901.

46. Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 270-72. See Ray, J. Karen, “Carry Nation,” in The Kansas Chautauqua: Profiles (Emporia, Kans.: Center for the Great Plains State, Emporia State University Press, 1986), 1–36 Google Scholar, for a broader sketch of chautauqua experiences.

47. Moore, , Selling God, 150 Google Scholar; Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 234.

48. See Moore's comments on Willard and Nation in his Selling God, 157-59; Maddox, Robert, “The War against Demon Rum,” American History Illustrated (May 1979): 44.Google Scholar The contrast between Willard and Nation is also noteworthy in terms of the logic undergirding their campaigns. Willard, as well as most temperance and prohibition workers, including the KSTU, had moved, by the 1890's, to a more efficiency-driven, “modern” rationale, while all of Nation's interpreters place her in the “old guard” of viewing drinking as a moral-religious problem rather than a socio-economic symptom. But interpreters fail to notice the paradox in the “old” content of her message versus her knack for framing it in “new” forms.

49. For an excellent analysis of the Salvation Army's relationship to commercial culture, see Diane Winston, “Boozers, Brass Bands, and Hallelujah Lassies: The Salvation Army and American Commercial Culture, 1880- 1918” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1996).

50. Winston, “Boozers,” 9. The Stockade Museum in Medicine Lodge has a picture of Nation standing with about ten Salvationists on a street corner.

51. Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 177-78.

52. Moore, , Selling God, 195-98.Google Scholar See Snyder, Robert, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, for a social history of vaudeville.

53. Will Carleton, Everywhere, excerpted in Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 298-301; The World, New York, November 18, 1902.

54. Carry Nation, Crookston, Minnesota, to the Fulcrum editor, June 29, 1902, Kansas State Historical Society; Nation, , The Use and Need, 179.Google Scholar Newspaper accounts of her visits to towns invariably commented on how many hatchet pins she sold at the close of a show, and her own newspaper had letters from people writing to request some of them to buy. She also advertised for “agents to handle my paper, buttons, pictures, water bottles and hatchets” in every State for a “handsome profit.” The buttons were “Home Defender” buttons that she called the “badge of our army.” Smasher's Mail, April 20, 1901.

55. Saturday Globe, reprinted in Taylor, Robert Lewis, Vessel of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry A. Nation (New York: New American Library, 1966)Google Scholar, unnumbered page.

56. McDannell, , Material Christianity, 45.Google Scholar

57. See Mrs. Kirk Malcolm and Mrs. Darrel Straughn to Robert Stout, letters to the editor, in Relics: A Link to Our Pioneer Heritage 3, no. 3 (October 1969): 19.

58. Nation, The Use and Need, rev. ed., 179.

59. Carry Nation Scrapbook, 47.

60. Life, March 28, 1901, 255.

61. She advertised 11″ x 14″ photographs of “Mrs. Carrie Nation and her hatchet” in Smasher's Mail, beginning with the March 23, 1901, issue.

62. The Hatchet, October 1, 1905; Mrs. George Ward to Robert Stout, letters to the editor, in Relics: A Link to Our Pioneer Heritage 3, no. 3 (October 1969): 19.

63. Her advertisements of the water bottles are to be found in virtually every issue of Smasher's Mail, March to December 1901. See the March 30 issue for the Chicagoan's quote.

64. “Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan” Time, November 7, 1932, 52; “American Don Quixote,” New Republic, November 23, 1932, 46-47; “Hatchet Lady” Newsweek, May 16, 1966, 115.

65. There have been a number of more recent artistic portrayals of the smasher: Cooke, Frank E., Carry: A Play with Music (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fiesta City Publishers, 1995)Google Scholar; Rokosny, John, “Carry Nation Musical Group— Rock Songs,” on one disc (San Francisco: Heyday Publishers, 1990)Google Scholar; Camp, Deborah, My Wild Rose: An Historical Romance (New York: Avon Books, 1992)Google Scholar; T. P. Bayer, Carrie Nation: A Farce in One Act (N.p., [1904], 1976); Smith, Helene, Carry A. Nation: One Woman's War on Drugs: A Drama (Greensburg, Pa.: McDonald Publishing, 1989).Google Scholar